


drink in all of this apocalypticism

by NinthFeather



Series: world's end dancehall [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Madoka Magica Fusion, Brief Discussion of Offscreen Sex Work, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Harm to Children, Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, No seriously this is not a happy fic, The OCs are background characters and also magical girls, Tragedy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25074691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NinthFeather/pseuds/NinthFeather
Summary: In a timeline that never happened, something else takes an interest in Vanya, years before Harold Jenkins puts his plans in motion.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: world's end dancehall [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1815976
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	drink in all of this apocalypticism

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, first of all, thank you so much to [FabHawk ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabHawk/works) for beta-ing and hand-holding me throughout the writing of this thing.
> 
> The title comes from the song [“World’s End Dancehall”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB75e7vzX0I) by the late Vocaloid composer and musician wowaka, specifically [the translyrics written by lasah](https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%82%BA%E3%82%A8%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%83%80%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%9B%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB_\(World%27s_End_Dancehall\)#Approved%20English%20Lyrics). 
> 
> Timeline-wise, this is set before Vanya writes her book for TUA, and it's best to assume that the main PMMM plot just hasn't happened yet.
> 
> Please read those tags! This fic is not the darkest TUA fic I’ve read by a long shot, but it gets into a couple topics I normally don’t touch. In particular, the reference to non-con is concerned with Klaus’s ability to consent to sex work while high, and is easily skippable if you just don’t read the paragraph starting, “He’d only seen bits of the girls’ other lives...” 
> 
> There are more detailed warnings in the end-note, so please go check it out if you need to! Thanks for reading.

The network-of-beings that called itself Incubator had spent several human decades determining how best to harvest human energy. With its experience from previous worlds, this task had not been particularly difficult, but nonetheless, it had spent quite a lot of time and given up precious energy resources in the pursuit of ensuring that its efforts to slow entropy were maximally efficient.

It had determined that it was most efficient to acquire energy from human girls during early-to-middle adolescence, when they first began puberty. It had a long list of reasons behind each preferred variable, many of which various contracted girls over the years had informed it were “sexist,” “weird,” or “kinda outdated.” But its approach continued to work, and so it stood by it.

However, there were times that it was tempted to make…exceptions. Not often. It was, first of all, a being of logic. But it served the purpose of preventing entropy, and sometimes, tempting amounts of energy appeared in humans that fell outside of its standard criteria.

When she was an adolescent, Vanya Hargreeves had barely shown enough potential to attract its attention. She could’ve become a magical girl, but the Incubator terminal that oversaw her city reported to the network that, based on its readings, she was unlikely to generate significant energy upon her very early death. Combined with reports regarding her family’s celebrity, the Incubator network had passed her over.

But now— _now_ —at age 24, she was a beacon. She was filled with tremendous energy as well as the kind of restless emotion that made adolescents so ideal for the Incubator’s purposes. Something had been suppressing both that awe-inspiring energy and her emotional turmoil, and now that the network of Incubator terminals could sense them both, it felt an unusual sensation.

It _wanted._

* * *

Number Five Hargreeves stopped short in the middle of assassinating a Swedish bookseller, overwhelmed by a sudden split in his memories.

He remembered finding his siblings’ corpses in the burnt-out ruins of the academy. But he also remembered finding the building deserted and searching for days before he found a stranger’s shredded corpse. He remembered wandering an ash-coated wasteland with Delores in a wagon behind him. He remembered carrying her across violently broken ground, far too fractured for a wagon to cross.

Two distinct apocalypses. One filled with ash and dead bodies. One like the aftermath of several natural disasters at once, but strangely empty of corpses. It was enough to give him a headache.

He filled his notebooks with coded notes on both, as much as he could remember, and, sure enough, eventually his memories shifted. Something had changed, something that cemented the apocalypse of ruined ground and strange weather patterns as the new future.

He would need to redo all of his math.

* * *

Klaus Hargreeves was one of the adults that homeless kids in his city trusted. Not completely, not when they knew he was always looking for his next high, but they also knew he wouldn’t turn them in to the cops or CPS unless he had no other options. Some of the kids needed that, and it was enough for them to talk to him, sometimes.

The kids were…strange. In some ways, they reminded Klaus of what it was like to have siblings, but they were so very, very different from Old Man Hargreeves’s little soldiers that it was jarring. They had trauma, sure, all of the people Klaus met on the streets did, but none of them had _training_.

Except, sometimes, Hailey and Cameron made him wonder. They’d called an ambulance for him once after he overdosed, apparently—not that he remembered the whole thing—and now they were firmly attached to him. But according to the others, the two of them only really talked when he was around, and it was always strangely businesslike between the two of them. The way they stood, with their hands clearly visible, always a strict amount of distance apart, reminded Klaus of the few times they’d tried to talk down villains instead of just killing everyone. Sometimes, one or the other would spend some time with him alone. Once, Hailey brought along a blonde named Lara, who lived over in the business district and still had a home.

Klaus made it his business to _never_ even approach sober around any of them, because he’d caught half a glimpse of Hailey’s mother while coming down hard from a bad high, and, judging by what he’d seen, she hadn’t died peacefully.

Not that you _could_ , but they hadn’t even come close.

It kind of explained why Hailey was so _mean_ all the time. Since Cameron was about as quiet as Vanya, he was pretty sure her story wasn’t nicer. Even Lara, the one time he met her, had a distinct air of “traumatized kid” around her. Klaus couldn’t help worrying.

Ben suggested that the interactions between the three girls were either a LARP or a very contained gang war, and either way, they’d chosen Klaus as the neutral territory. He also thought choosing Klaus as the neutral territory was a stupid decision.

Klaus ignored the criticism but admitted that both were good theories. Either one would explain why all three of them were wearing weirdly elaborate rings.

* * *

Ben Hargreeves was a ghost, and he could see plenty of sh*t normal people couldn’t. He knew it wasn’t a f*cking LARP. But he wasn’t about to tell his high-out-of-his-mind brother that the little kids he was awkwardly trying to mentor were running around fighting eldritch horrors. He’d go try to help. He’d get killed trying. And then they’d both end up wandering the earth as restless spirits.

Klaus didn’t even remember his one and only encounter with the girls in their magical getups. He’d been too high to notice the alley he was in twisting into something sinister or listen to Ben yelling at him to get the h*ll out of there, and then, suddenly, his eyes had glazed over. Before Ben could even protest, he was shoving a handful of pills into his mouth and then sitting down where he was, a terrifying, blissed-out expression on his face.

Ben had been sure he was about to be one of two dead Hargreeves brothers when two girls in elaborate costumes showed up. Hailey spent a half-hour trying to figure out what Klaus had done to himself, then calling an ambulance for him, while Cameron returned only a few minutes before it showed up, covered in cuts and bruises. Ben still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but something had _made_ Klaus do that, and they’d done their best to help him.

When Klaus woke up in the hospital, confused about how and why he’d overdosed, Ben had decided not to question it. And Klaus, in turn, decided not to question it when Hailey and Cameron practically attached themselves to his side. At first, Ben was pretty sure, they’d just been worried about him. But eventually, they started to develop some genuine affection for him, as weird as it seemed.

He’d only seen bits of the girls’ other lives, after that, mostly while wandering around while Klaus was sleeping or…doing other things Ben tried not to think about. Ben could barely deal with the idea of his brother having sex when he was sure it was safe and fully consensual, so after a while, he’d started ditching when Klaus found alternate ways to pay for drugs. And since he wasn’t attached to a living person, he got to see a lot of things that he was pretty sure were supposed to be secret.

There was so much of it he didn’t understand. He only saw any of them actually fighting once, and he couldn’t really process the existence of the thing Hailey was facing off against. That was speaking as a person who had died with a portal to a dimension containing an eldritch horror in his stomach and now existed as a ghost. It was more waveform than creature, a mess of diamond facets bobbing and weaving constantly. The only proof he had that it existed physically was the fact that Hailey was thrown back when part of it smacked against her.

Ben’s other sightings of the girls were no less strange. They materialized jewels out of thin air, wielded weapons as confidently as Diego, popped in and out of reality, and sometimes fought one another. Most worryingly, they had full conversations with a cat-rabbit creature that they called “Cubie,” in which they alluded to some sort of contract that obliged them to do all of this. It was bizarre and upsetting and Ben _wanted_ to tell Klaus, except he wasn’t sure he could trust Klaus to handle it.

He wanted to believe in Klaus. He _did_. But just seeing ghosts had torn him apart. What would all of this do?

Ben was the only sibling left who hadn’t given up on Klaus, and sometimes, he felt himself getting close. He couldn’t make things worse. If telling Klaus drove him deeper into addiction, or spurred him into reckless action, or threw his mental health completely off balance, well…Ben would never forgive himself.

So Ben kept his peace, at least for now.

* * *

Diego Hargreeves had a dozen reasons for staying up nights and listening to the police scanner. Despite what his ex-girlfriend said, not all of them were childhood trauma.

Before he dropped out of the police academy, he’d noticed some weird patterns in the crime data. People going missing for no apparent reason. Unexplained mass suicides—not many, but more than one. The police chief was completely uninterested, and so were most of the old guard. They all insisted that ‘these things happened.’

Look, Diego, who had no biological father and could manipulate trajectories with his mind, was the first to admit that sometimes, weird sh*t just happened. But eighteen unconnected people locking themselves in a warehouse and then setting it on fire went past his usual standards for weird sh*t.

A good half of his remaining siblings lived in this city. His _mom_ lived here. He wasn’t just going to let this go, not if it could threaten them.

First, though, he had to go track down some teenager who’d busted into seven vending machines in the last day.

* * *

When Allison Hargreeves was 14, she had an imaginary friend, probably. Well, at least, no one else had been able to see her. And, well, she seemed like the kind of imaginary friend that a child soldier might make up.

Her name was Michiko, and she could do magic, but she had promised the person who gave her powers that she would fight monsters. She was always tired and bruised, and she had a fancy outfit that looked sort of like something out of a cartoon. She told Allison that she wanted to talk to her because she might understand how it was, to have to fight all the time.

Allison looked back on her, and thought about how much she’d wanted a friend, someone who’d want her as much as she wanted them, someone who could understand that being “The Rumor” wasn’t as cool as it seemed. In a world with ghosts and super-strength, magic wasn’t that implausible.

But she couldn’t get past how perfectly tailored to what she’d needed Michiko had been, or the fact that she’d disappeared about a year and a half later. Allison did remember missing her, but…kids were strange.

She’d had weirder coping mechanisms over the course of her life. 

* * *

All Vanya Hargreeves ever wanted was to be something other than ordinary. And now, she was. She had magic, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t like she’d thought it would be.

On one level, she was everything she’d always dreamed of being. Gorgeous in white tailcoat and slacks, wielding her violin bow like a weapon, as powerful as—no, more powerful than any of her siblings. But on another level, she now understood what they meant when they said they didn’t want to fight anymore.

This was dirty, exhausting work. There was always, _always_ another witch or familiar, and people were always in danger. Sometimes _she_ was in danger. Now that she’d taken the contract, now that she had these powers, she would always be in danger. No way out. It felt like a trap. Had it been a trap?

If it was, then what trap had her siblings fallen into? Being born?

No, it had to be different for them. Because they’d stopped, and the world hadn’t ended, and they hadn’t died. But if she stopped, if her soul gem darkened—well, she didn’t know what would happen exactly, but the other girls, the younger ones—they said it would be bad.

They looked so serious. They reminded her of Ben, far too old for their years.

Had her siblings really had to fight at their age? No—no, by their age, Five was already gone, and Klaus had already started sneaking out to buy drugs.

Why had she expected powers to fix anything? Why had she expected there to _be_ a solution?

Her family had fallen apart a decade ago and here she was, years late, trying to pretend by herself that she was part of the team—

That was so silly, so futile, it was almost funny.

No, actually, it was pretty funny, except she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry about it.

Maybe both?

Huh, why could she hear violins all of a sudden—

Why did they sound out of tune—

What was—

* * *

Luther Hargreeves was still getting used to life on the moon, but he liked to look out over the Earth every time it passed between the moon and the sun. It was beautiful, almost like watching a sunrise. Sometimes it was enough to make him forget that he was alone.

Today, though, he was distracted by the massive storm system obscuring—most of the globe, actually. Luther wasn’t a meteorologist, but he didn’t think they usually got that big. Or reflected light quite like that. Even on the side of the planet farthest from the sun, it was still brilliant white.

That…that couldn’t actually be a storm, could it?

He squinted at it for a few seconds, then suddenly realized it was getting brighter. He barely had time to shield his eyes before white _flooded his vision._

* * *

Number Five Hargreeves, fresh off his first, second, and third attempts at time travel, landed in the middle of an impact crater, and found that his powers had stopped working. The buildings around him were so battered that he could barely recognize them, and the streets were torn and buckled, as if in the aftermath of an earthquake.

Overwhelmed and terrified, he stumbled through the destroyed city until he arrived at the gates of The Umbrella Academy, only to find it destroyed and empty.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for: Kyuubey’s predatory behavior, TUA-typical bad coping mechanisms throughout, discussion of assassination, discussion of corpses, Klaus-typical discussion of homelessness and drug use, PMMM-typical discussion of magic-induced suicide (both involving main characters and not), PMMM-typical discussion of kids being homeless, orphaned, and forced into dangerous situations, discussion of questionably consensual sex work, a character convincing herself she imagined her own childhood experiences, the PMMM-equivalent of a character losing their connection with reality, TUA-typical apocalypse
> 
> The good news is that I’m working on another fic for this series of PMMM/TUA crossovers in which everything doesn’t go to heck immediately. It’ll probably have more OCs, but also more Klaus, which I think is a plus. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!
> 
> (edited briefly after posting because I forgot some of the notes, heh)


End file.
